From his earliest manhood he had followed the drum, first under the veteran Dutch commanders in their long war against Catholic Spain and then under the greatest captain of the age, the veritable 'Lion of the North', King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, in his homeric struggle against the Imperial tyranny of the Holy Roman Empire on behalf of German Protestantism. ''

The body of native criticism remains as I have described it; an endless piling up of platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions, an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic morality.

The poet was hymning the homeric struggle of the great goddesses, whose lances had clashed together since the beginning of the ages: the eternal Iliad which is to that of Troy what the Alps are to the little hills of Greece.

He stripped to the waist, and each man presented a rounded development of muscular power, which would have done credit to any of the homeric heroes; but there was a look of grand intelligence and refinement in